by Christian Jungersen & translated by Anna Paterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2007
Jungersen raises moral questions tactfully, without trivializing the issues.
Danish author Jungersen’s second novel, a bestseller in Europe and his first to be translated into English, suggests a connection between office politics and genocide; the book won Denmark’s Golden Laurels prize.
In the office of the nonprofit Danish Center for Information on Genocide (DCIG), five people work in too-close proximity to one another. Iben is an intellectual who writes tracts on the psychology of evil. A few months earlier she had been briefly held as a hostage in Kenya, so she has witnessed hatred first hand. Her best friend Malene had helped her get her job at DCIG, but what began as a source of gratitude is gradually becoming a source of resentment. Paul is the effective leader of the organization on a macroscopic level, but he’s an ineffectual arbiter of office politics. When Iben receives a life-threatening e-mail, her first thought is that it came from Mirko Zigic, a Serbian war criminal on whom Iben has written an exposé, but other possibilities emerge. Could it have been Anne-Lise, the librarian ostracized by others in the office and perhaps trying to get revenge? Or Malene, who accuses others of having a split personality but who might be suffering from the pathology herself? When Malene’s boyfriend Rasmus is killed after trying to track down the source of the e-mail, everyone becomes a suspect, including the elusive Zigic. Jungersen makes the point that hatred and dehumanization start at a humble and comprehensible level, ironically in an office devoted to the chronicling of genocidal atrocities. Even timid Anne-Lise ultimately realizes that “we all have it in us to be murderers and executioners and war criminals.”
Jungersen raises moral questions tactfully, without trivializing the issues.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51629-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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by Christian Jungersen ; translated by Misha Hoekstra
by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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